Published Spring 2025
In February 2022 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin condemning online voices and public gatherings attacking such government COVID policies as mask and vaccine mandates. Those spreading “misinformation” about the pandemic, DHS warned, were undermining “public trust in the U.S. government institutions” and could be considered a “domestic threat actor” or a “primary terrorism-related threat.”
How did government vigilance against lethal attacks like 9/11 culminate in the claim that critics of public health measures were terrorists? The bulletin ignored the possibility that one reason trust in our governing institutions had been undermined was not denunciations of our pandemic policies but the policies themselves, along with the government’s manipulative public messaging about them. For DHS—a federal department that did not exist 20 years ago but today has a $103 billion budget—the real problem was anyone so rude as to call attention to such failings.
The government’s excessive COVID response did not begin with the 2020 pandemic. In Homeland, Richard Beck explores how the War on Terror has transformed American society and politics. A writer for the literary magazine n+1 and a political progressive, Beck praises Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, speculates on the root causes of mass shootings, digresses about immigration policy, and warns repeatedly about the “existential threat” posed by climate change. He also belabors the idea that racism and Islamophobia drove the War on Terror. Although a disciplined editor could have abbreviated these sections, trimming the book’s nearly 600 pages in the bargain, Homeland nevertheless usefully chronicles our misadventures in fighting terrorism at home and abroad. The corrosive effects that Beck describes should appall both liberals and conservatives who care about living in a free society.
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Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a Fellow & Director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is a physician specializing in psychiatry and author of three books, including most recently, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022).
